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Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

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Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#101

Post by brewmarche »

15characterslon wrote: post #65
moedersmooiste wrote: post #26

Also went looking for an alternative and moved everyting to mailbox.org...

Be aware that Mailbox.org allows any user to send emails as ("from") any other user via SMTP and these emails will look legit since they pass SPF and DKIM checks. Many consider this a security issue. There was a quite lengthy discussion about this in their forum but they deleted it since. They refused to fix it. Archive.org still has it. Content is in German (sorry): https://web.archive.org/web/20210123192856/https:/…

Oh wow, do you perhaps have more details on the current situation? The CEO’s response is from 4 years ago.

I also don’t fully understand the reasoning. Having an open SMTP server that doesn’t restrict senders is one thing, but attaching DKIM without further checks is another.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#102

Post by rasulkireev »

mattlondon wrote: post #50

I have used Zoho for my burner domain for a couple of years. It's functional and works ok, but is not as slick as Gmail (both web and app)

I love Zoho for what they offer for $12/year. I agree that UI is better on Gmail, which is why I redirect all email to my GMail Dashboard.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#103

Post by jldl805 »

vmoore wrote: post #57

I'm confused by all the branding. Google change the names to things every week. Is it Google Docs, or Google One, or Google Workspace, or GSuite? They need to stop this.

Google and confusing, misguided name changes for already-effective products: name a more iconic duo.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#104

Post by gst »

mxrlkn wrote: post #99
mdasen wrote: post #22

Google Takeout will export all your mail in mbox format which is easily handled by mail programs like Apple Mail and Thunderbird and should let you sync everything to a new service (if that service won't let you transfer it themselves). I'm using iCloud+ from Apple. It's cheap at $1/mo for 50GB of space and lets me have my custom domains. $3/mo will get you family sharing and 200GB of space (if you want multiple acco…

I just switched to iCloud as well, but I want all my email forwarded to my private gmail account. One thing to be aware of with iCloud is that it doesn't do ARC, so your forwarded emails will fail on SPF. I instead use cloudflare's email forwarding for incoming email, which does support ARC, and then iCloud for outgoing. Works well so far.

Are you sure that Cloudflare supports ARC? Last time I checked they used SRS for sender rewriting (that's why SPF doesn't fail), but didn't support ARC yet.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#105

Post by nachteilig »

mdasen wrote: post #22

Google Takeout will export all your mail in mbox format which is easily handled by mail programs like Apple Mail and Thunderbird and should let you sync everything to a new service (if that service won't let you transfer it themselves). I'm using iCloud+ from Apple. It's cheap at $1/mo for 50GB of space and lets me have my custom domains. $3/mo will get you family sharing and 200GB of space (if you want multiple acco…

Does iCloud+ support catch all on custom domains now? I really like this about Google but would also be glad to go elsewhere

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#106

Post by lbotos »

bertman wrote: post #96
lbotos wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined MXRoute at a suggestion in on hackernews and I'm... probably gonna be moving away when my year is up. Two issues I had: 1. 3 times my emails to gmail will be "silently delivered" in that they don't bounce but they don't land in the inbox. I had it happen to me (sending to my test gmail), me sending to a friend, and me sending to a business. It's a gmail problem, but this never happened when I was on fastmail…

Re. 2.: https://accounts.mxroute.com/index.php?/news/view/18/don--03... Looks like you were not the only one.

Right. It's one thing to ask customers to choose a different provider, and I'd happily consider. It's another to blanket block receiving mail from mailjet. I have no clue how many vendors that I've purchased from that are using mailjet!

(Sure, if you wanna send it to spam, I'm open to that, but it was dropped on the floor...)

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#107

Post by mxrlkn »

gst wrote: post #104
mxrlkn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched to iCloud as well, but I want all my email forwarded to my private gmail account. One thing to be aware of with iCloud is that it doesn't do ARC, so your forwarded emails will fail on SPF. I instead use cloudflare's email forwarding for incoming email, which does support ARC, and then iCloud for outgoing. Works well so far.

Are you sure that Cloudflare supports ARC? Last time I checked they used SRS for sender rewriting (that's why SPF doesn't fail), but didn't support ARC yet.

There's ARC headers on the emails I get forwarded, so looks like it. I don't know about SRS.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#108

Post by discardedrefuse »

fy20 wrote: post #71
troydavis wrote: post #3

This question comes up a couple times every month. FastMail always comes up as a recommendation, so if you search comments for FastMail, you’ll find every past thread (and relatively few false positives): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... Example from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

How does FastMail handle tags? I tried Zoho but it's pretty terrible compared to how Gmail works. What I'd like is: 1) To be able to assign tags based on rules 2) To be able to view those tags in IMAP clients (Gmail exposes labels as IMAP folders) 3) To be able to Archive mail so they are no longer in the Inbox, but so the tag remains (in Gmail, 'Inbox' is just a tag that is removed when you Archive mail) Zoho fails…

FastMail doesn't have tags. What it does have? Let me copy/paste my comment from another thread:

They have subdomain addressing, which is kind of like plus addressing, but better (not all places let you sign up with plus addressing).

I've got my own domain, for example: mydomain.com. So my fastmail email address is depingus@mydomain.com. But with subdomain addressing, I can sign up for services with unique email addresses that look like:

social.hackernews@depingus.mydomain.com

I don't have to set up this alias ahead of time. Fastmail will automatically route incoming messages arriving to this email address to my "social" folder. If I start getting junk to that address I can easily blacklist it.

It wasn't easy switching out my email address EVERYWHERE. And there are places that won't even let me change it. But in the end, it was so worth it. I don't even miss Google Inbox anymore!

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#109

Post by MandieD »

jldl805 wrote: post #103
vmoore wrote: post #57

I'm confused by all the branding. Google change the names to things every week. Is it Google Docs, or Google One, or Google Workspace, or GSuite? They need to stop this.

Google and confusing, misguided name changes for already-effective products: name a more iconic duo.

Microsoft comes close - my most personally irritating example was them trading “Lync” (short, wonderfully searchable, very little rubbish returned) for “Skype for Business” (impossible to search for specific technical matters, and the site itself was blocked by most corporate web filters for the first several weeks)

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#110

Post by buttocks »

velcrovan wrote: post #46
buttocks wrote: post #2

HN is a hard place for people who like Microsoft but I'll tell you that a single user Office 365 Business Essentials subscription is a great deal. Along with e-mail you get a terabyte of Sharepoint (OneDrive) storage, online versions of office apps, and Teams. $5/mo. There's an IMAP migration tool. Just turn on IMAP on your Gmail account if it's not already enabled and let the O365/Exchange wizard suck all the e-mail…

I’ve been considering this, but how good is the spam filtering included with this plan? Do people often end up bolting on 3rd-party spam filters in front of Business Essentials?

I haven't adjusted the spam filter. I have been using it in the default configuration since I signed up and it filters out most. YMMV.
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